BROADCASTS.com

Evan Liang. He\u2019s the CEO and co-founder of LeanData which he founded after managing a data cleanup project at his first company and felt the pain of cleaning Salesforce data by hand. Prior to LeanData, he was the GM and VP of products at Caring.com where he grew a small acquisition within the company\u2019s main business. Generally, he owned 50% of the company\u2019s revenue over 2 years. Before Caring.com, Evan worked at Shasta Ventures, a leading venture capital firm focused on end-user driven businesses. Before that, he worked in project management at eBay and business development at Microsoft where he helped launched the Xbox 360. Evan started his career at Battery Ventures where he specialized in software and ecommerce investments. He holds his MBA from Kellogg and BS in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? \u2013 The Hard Thing About Hard Things
• What CEO do you follow? \u2013 Rich Hagberg
• Favorite online tool? \u2014 Slack
• How many hours of sleep do you get?\u2014 8
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? \u2013 \u201cI want to be an entrepreneur and not a VC first\u201d

\xa0

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 02:03 \u2013 Nathan introduces Evan to the show
• 03:04 \u2013 LeanData helps marketing and sales scale their lead management processes
  • 03:11 \u2013 They\u2019re focused on two business processes: lead routing and marketing attribution
• 03:20 \u2013 Cloudera is one of their customers
  • 03:30 \u2013 With all the leads that are coming into Cloudera\u2019s system, LeanData will figure out which sales rep should follow up
• 03:43 \u2013 LeanData works well with lead scoring predictive vendors
• 04:30 \u2013 LeanData is a SaaS business
• 04:36 \u2013 Average customer pays $20-30K a year
  • 04:42 \u2013 Large enterprises are paying 6 figures
• 04:54 \u2013 The pricing depends on the number of seats
• 05:24 \u2013 Marketing attribution is an upsell from the product
• 05:34 \u2013 LeanData was launched in 2012
• 05:46 \u2013 Evan has always been passionate with startups and he was just waiting for the right idea to come along
• 06:18 \u2013 Evan was at Caring when he saw the problem that LeanData was able to solve
  • 06:40 \u2013 They had a large amount of data in Salesforce that was a big mess
• 07:25 \u2013 First year revenue of LeanData was $200K
• 08:08 \u2013 LeanData raised $1.3M from their seed round
  • 08:19 \u2013 Total funds raised $18M
  • 08:28 \u2013 The seed round was a priced round
• 09:12 \u2013 Current team size is 50
  • 09:28 \u2013 15 are engineers, 15 in sales, 5 in marketing, 8 in CS
• 09:48 \u2013 LeanData currently has 250 enterprise customers
• 10:13 \u2013 MRR is around $600K and ARR is around $7.5M
• 10:34 \u2013 The weirdest marketing strategy of LeanData\u2019s was sending pizzas to people
  • 11:00 \u2013 It was a marketing campaign and the customers picked the pizza place where they wanted their pizzas from
  • 11:27 \u2013 The problem was some chosen pizza places wouldn\u2019t deliver so one of the SDRs would have to buy the pizza and deliver it
  • 11:56 \u2013 They were still able to get some sales from that campaign
• 12:08 \u2013 The primary CAC is for events
  • 12:32 \u2013 One event is the Lunch and Learn Event
  • 13:05 \u2013 They spent around 600K in strategizing conferences over a year
  • 13:17 \u2013 Paid advertising spend is less than 10K
• 14:04 \u2013 Annual logo churn is 15%
• 14:13 \u2013 LeanData is currently net negative revenue churn
• 14:30 \u2013 ARPU expansion is between 5-10%
• 14:48 \u2013 LTV is around 5 years
• 15:35 \u2013 LeanData\u2019s competitors in the ABM lead scoring space
• 16:27 \u2013 Gross margin is 80%
  • 16:42 \u2013 LeanData benefits from Salesforce
  • 17:16 \u2013 LeanData doesn\u2019t need backend servers
• 17:30 \u2013 Evan answers about their exit strategy since it seems like Salesforce is the only one who can acquire them
• 18:30 \u2013 The Famous Five

\xa0

3 Key Points:

1. Organizing your data is crucial for the company\u2019s operations.
2. The weirdest marketing strategy can take people aback and still win business for you.
3. The exit of a company depends upon the possibility of an acquisition; however, there will always be other options.

\xa0

Resources Mentioned:

• Simplero \u2013 The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
• The Top Inbox \u2013 The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
• GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
• Klipfolio \u2013 Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• Hotjar \u2013 Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you\u2019re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
• Acuity Scheduling \u2013 Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Host Gator\u2013 The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
• Audible\u2013 Nathan uses Audible when he\u2019s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives